Hi all, hope someone can help me out.

I know this is a dumb question but this is the first time i've ever had a broken disc. Today, I couldn't run Free Time and after checking my CD drive was working with other disks, I noticed a slight crack at the centre of the FT disc. I'm assuming I need to buy a new one (pig sick about that but what can you do? And I assume there is no purchasable download...
Question is, if I buy a new disk, will I have to reinstall and lose my game?

From my own experiences no you "Do Not" have to reinstall your game at all . I have had the same problems many times with crack disk I just place my "Back Up" disk in the player and the game just keep right on rolling.
I always buy more than one of the exact same disk ( EP ) from Amazon, because of crack problems. Whatever EP disk you use to startup your game, it is always a good idea to have an extra or spare one.

I have 3 extra copies of my Seasons EP that way I do not worry about crack disk. But one thing you should do is "Always keep a backup copy of your Sims game that way you need not worry about losing your game.
So again NO just get an extra Freetime EP place it in your player and the game will continue like always. Ok

I don't think the game actually requires a disk in the drive to run. I haven't had my AL disk in the drive for ages and the game loads fine.

No it won't reinstall. It's the same game. You could always just crack the game, to be fair - just be careful with some of them because they freeze your game at startup.

I run a netbook with no disktray... go figure

My game definitely won't start without the disk. I too use a netbook with no disktray, but I always use a USB DVD drive when I'm playing the Sims. If I don't have my DVD drive connected, or the wrong disk is in the drive, I get an error message and my game won't start.

Being completely new to "serious" gaming when I got The Sims 2, I had never come across this idea of having to leave the disk in the drive to run the program before, except for programs that kept their data on the CD to avoid clogging up the hard drive, and a comms app I wrote myself years ago that needed a particular floppy disk left in the drive before it would work (because the client was obsessive about security!). It took me a while to get used to the idea that my game wouldn't start without the DVD in the drive. With other programs I'd normally just use the disk to install the program and then put it away to store it forever!

I, personally, am violently against having to re-buy a game that you've already paid for because of something like this. Especially since EA itself no longer sells the game. I've bought the whole series twice over now. No more. Were I you, I'd get a no-CD crack. I used one when I was playing on a netbook that didn't have a DVD/CD drive. I used an external drive to install the game onto it, but the whole point of the netbook was to be able to play the game on the road when I was traveling a lot for about 8 months or so. I wasn't about to lug around the external drive, too, which was not much smaller than the netbook itself, on top of everything else I had to lug around. If I'd wanted to do that, I would have just bought a cheap (but much heavier) and disposable laptop instead. Anyway, the crack worked fine. I won't tell you where to find one because I'm sure that's against the rules here -- Heck, it might be against the rules just to talk about them, and if so someone can yell at me -- but they're easy enough to find using your favorite search engine.

The ability to start the game without the disk must have come with a later EP. It is good, because you can put the disk away somewhere secure and not worry about it getting damaged.

Site rules do not allow for discussion of no-cd cracks, even for a legit game with a broken disk, totally understandable that you would use a crack in that case but I cannot condone such a thing etc and so forth...... Soooo I gotta lock this. Yeah.